It’s hard to shake the feeling that Jesus loves us when we’re good and doesn’t when we’re not. Even when we’ve heard the Good News a million times and believed that message way on down in our hearts, we sometimes still see God as a celestial scorekeeper just waiting to call us out for each and every rules violation. We imagine Jesus with a clipboard and a calculator, meticulously recording our wrongs with a disappointed scowl. I know I’m not the only one like this. Have you ever looked back over the things you did and said only to tally up the good and the bad in your head? All that mental math shows us that we still see Jesus as a fickle friend who’s basically impossible to please. How can we believe the truth of the Gospel and yet still think God only loves us when we’re behaving? The fact is, our desire to earn love is engrained deep down into our psyche. You can see it in little kids’ sports when they do something really good or really bad and the first place they look is to their dad. They’re thinking, “Was it good enough? Did I pass your test?” We mess up in life and we assume that our Lord is let down, bummed to a have loser kid like us, but it’s not true! Romans 5 says God showed us what His love is like because Jesus died for us when we were still sinners! We didn’t have to behave or perform well to earn His love! He freely gave it when we were at our worst. He decided to love us. We didn’t earn His love, which means we can’t un-earn it.
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